The animal remained still, quivering faintly with the power of its uninvited guest, watching the Indian until he drew level with it and then passed. Hunting Wolf carried on along the track, and when the sound of fox teeth tearing at fox flesh began behind him, he merely blinked and focused his hugely dilated pupils on the snow between the tracks, as it blew across the frozen metal.

He bit into the second leaf, and stepped aside to continue as his foot kicked the twisted carcass of a mink.

The tipis made their own miniature mountain range, clustered together as they were about half a mile from the railroad camp. The poles protruding from the apex of each triangle splayed out in irregular fans and delicate tendrils of blue smoke played between them. As he approached, Henderson mused on the perfection of the tipis’ gradient and design, how the snow could gain no hold at all on such a surface. Hunting Wolf had told him they rarely used them now. He and his family had a cabin on the Redhorn reserve, at least eight days’ hard walking from Siding Twenty-three, and they camped in tipis only when moving the cattle or horses to distant summer grazings. But for this exercise, the Kinchuinick disruption of McEwan’s great tunnelling project, the tipi had enjoyed a winter resurrection.

Deep in his pocket, James Henderson’s fingers toyed with the small crucifix he had whittled from a piece of seasoned jack pine, and rehearsed in his head the Siouan words he would use in the giving of the gift. The huge flat flakes of falling snow were so light they hung on the minister’s hair and face like flying summer seeds.

He felt good. Singing Tree and her silent, doe-eyed boy had stayed with him and soothed away his fear. There had been no recurrence of the nightmare from three days ago and he knew now that he had been feverish, ill and deluded. Strange that the people who had induced his madness with their tales could also cure it. But he wanted to show his gratitude to them, and he felt a stab of guilt that he had not granted the prize of the ivory and mahogany crucifix to the little boy who had fetched his wood and filled his cabin with his childish humanity. He hoped his own amateur effort in carving would suffice, and possibly help bring the heathen child to his God. And he wanted to speak with Hunting Wolf, to try to make sense of what had happened to his mind after the incident in the tunnel. If there had been an incident. McEwan suggested that Hunting Wolf’s injuries had been self-inflicted and the university-educated Edinburgh minister, who was the pilot of this thin, stranded soul, had to agree.